Auto-eject in advanced fighters: Do on-board computers make the call and take action?

[Bijou_Drains]

a school friend’s father was killed in a B52 crash right near the end of Vietnam. I believe he was a navigator. The plane was shot up but they decided to try to limp back to base in Thailand rather than bail out because one guy was injured and could not bail out. The plane crashed at the base and only 1 guy survived the crash. I never knew until now he was on the bottom level of the plane.

LT COL Donald Arrington Joyner (1931-1972) - Find a Grave Memorial

[outlierrn]

@Velocity

ISTM that in certain, limited situations, this would be very easy for a computer to do. I.e., if plane is pointed directly nose-down at 500 mph and, say, less than a thousand feet AGL then the computer would know this is a fatally irrecoverable dive and auto-eject.

I doubt that that’s a survivable ejection scenario.

[davidm]

Maybe this is a dumb question but how much longer will fighters even have pilots on board? We seem to have pretty reliable remote control of drones.

[Atomic_Alex]

@Czarcasm

Would an AI system be able to tell that a pilot isn’t trying to recover, but is actually trying to lessen civilian damage by guiding where the crash will happen?

Currently I doubt it, but its really more for training or combat scenarios where either they aren’t near civilian areas or not so concerned about collateral damage.

Its only a matter of degree though and the way things are progressing and as davidm suggests there may not even be a human on board in the near-to-medium future anyway.

@KarlGauss

Thanks for the link. Excellent. That is very much what I was getting at (and will assume that the still-classified stuff can do more and better).

I thought it was rather neat myself. Although I enjoy driving I can see this sort of technology making it into ordinary cars and accidents being a thing of the past. Well much less common than now!